More good stuff from Grameen

I've been interested in the idea of getting Internet access to villages for a long time, and a number of years ago I brought it up at a business luncheon meeting at the Indian Embassy, the topic technology, my interest, getting computer access to women. The many men ignored the few women, but my son Matt was with me and egged me on, so just before they closed the floor, I grabbed the mic and brought it up. When the economic director (who was charming and dismissive) said it would take many years to get internet access to villages, I pinned him, saying that's a man's way of doing things. That it can be done much faster, little by little, here and there, the way a woman would do it.

Afterwards I was surrounded by a small group of enthusiastic people, among them a man who said he was going to do his best to get cell phone access for the internet to villages. This was about 7 years ago, and I never heard of anything happening in that arena until today when I found this article in the Washington post (you can find the whole thing at : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/21/AR2006112101725_pf.html




Internet Extends Reach Of Bangladeshi Villagers
Cellphone-Linked Computers Help Break Rural Isolation
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 22, 2006; A12

CHARKHAI, Bangladesh -- The village doctor's diagnosis was dire: Marium needed immediate surgery to replace two heart valves.

The 28-year-old mother of three said she was confused and terrified. She could barely imagine open-heart surgery. She had no idea how her family of farm laborers could pay for an operation that would cost $4,000.

The next day, Sept. 16, her father went to see Mahbubul Ambia, who had recently installed the only Internet connection for 20 miles in far northeastern Bangladesh. Ambia sat down at a computer, connected to the Internet by a cable plugged into his cellphone, and searched for cardiac specialists in Dhaka, the capital, 140 miles away. He found one and made an appointment for Marium, who like many people here goes by just one name. The specialist examined her and said she needed only a routine surgical procedure that cost $500.

"I felt a very deep sense of relief," Marium said.

Villages in one of the world's poorest countries, long isolated by distance and deprivation, are getting their first Internet access, all connected over cellphones. And in the process, millions of people who have no land-line telephones, and often lack electricity and running water, in recent months have gained access to services considered basic in richer countries: weather reports, e-mail, even a doctor's second opinion.

Cellphones have become a new bridge across the digital divide between the world's rich and poor, as innovators use the explosive growth of cellphone networks to connect people to the Internet.

Bangladesh now has about 16 million cellphone subscribers -- and 2 million new users each month -- compared with just 1 million land-line phones to serve a population of nearly 150 million people.

Since February, Internet centers have opened in well over 100 Bangladeshi villages, and a total of 500 are scheduled to be open by the end of the year. All of them are in places where there are no land lines and the connections will be made exclusively over cellphone networks.

Before February, analysts said, only 370,000 Bangladeshis had access to the Internet. But now millions of villagers have access to information and services that had been available only by walking or taking long and expensive bus rides, or were beyond their reach altogether.

People now download job applications and music, see school exam results, check news and crop prices, make inexpensive Internet phone calls or use Web cameras to see relatives. Students from villages with few books now have access to online dictionaries and encyclopedias.

"We could not imagine where this technology has taken us in such a short time," said Mufizur Rahman, 48, a grocery shop owner in Charkhai, a town of about 40,000 people whose streets are filled with colorful three-wheeled bicycle rickshaws, and where there are almost no cars.

"For the First World, this is minor," he said. "But this is a big thing for us."

The Internet centers are being set up by GrameenPhone, a cellphone provider partly owned by the Grameen Bank, which shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with its founder, Muhammad Yunus.

The centers are building on a cellphone network created over the past decade by a Grameen Bank program that helped provide more than 250,000 cellphones in villages. When that program started in 1997, only 1.5 percent of the population had access to a telephone; that has risen to more than 10 percent....

(more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/21/AR2006112101725_pf.html)

This deserves its own weblog!

I found a long-lost file of clippings I'd collected very randomly, here and there, about people who were doing good in the world, usually with some kind of small business, or in some other unusual way.

And I'd like to dedicate it to one of my favorite Good Guys, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize and head of the Grameen Bank, Muhammed Yunus, whose work I've been following for many years. What did he do that was ingenious? He loaned money to the poor, without requiring any collateral.

Banks usually consider that a huge risk. They loan money to those who already have enough to be considered good risks: if they don't pay the loan, they've agreed to give the bank something of equal or greater value: a home, a building, stocks, etc.

Yunus has been making loans of $50 to $250 (perhaps more) to the poorest of the poor, and then, always, to women. His philosophy is: if you give money to a man, you don't know where it will end up. If you give it to a woman, the whole family will benefit.

So far it seems that almost all his loans have been returned.

He has people borrow the money in small groups in which each is responsible for the debts of all, and this has also been an ingenious thing to do, but in his recent interview by Jon Steward on The Daily Show, it was clear that he didn't want us to assume that this is the main reason that the poor repay their debts. He didn't get much of a chance to talk, he was hurried off the show for some reason, but he made it clear that the poor are, in themselves, very good risks and should be loaned money to start their own small businesses no matter what the repayment incentive is.

But those groups of 5 are much more useful than just as repayment delivery systems. Because they're responsible for each other's debt, they're highly motivated to find ways for everyone to succeed. As I've always said (regarding my own version of Yunus's small groups, Success Teams ) Isolation is the dreamkiller.

Three cheers for Mohammed Yunus and may we all find ways to follow his example.

Incidentally, a pair of young business school graduates (with hearts as big as their brains) have done it. A year or so ago, I donated a small sum of money to IRC (I forget what that stands for, but I'll find it and come back to fix it), and I've been getting reports ever since from Africa, from the small business people who used it to get their businesses up and running, and have repaid it so it can be loaned to other small business people. It's a brilliant model. I'll go find the link so you can donate some money if you want. It's great fun to get reports from little businesses you're helping with your piddling little loan. For example, one person catches and sells fish, another has a used clothing shop, another might be starting a mechanic repair shop.

HERE'S A GOOD LINK FOR YOU TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT YUNUS AND THE GRAMEEN BANK: http://www.grameen-info.org/

Okay, that's all for now. I have to get back to writing my next book.

NEXT TIME: MORE INGENIOUS GOOD GUYS. WATCH THIS SPACE (AND ADD YOUR OWN GOOD GUYS!! I'D LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT THEM.)